THOMAS KENDALL is the author of The Autodidacts (Whiskey Tit Press, 2022), which Dennis Cooper called “a brilliant novel—inviting like a secret passage, infallible in its somehow orderly but whirligig construction, spine-tingling to unpack, and as haunted as any fiction in recent memory.” His work has appeared in the anthologies Abyss (Orchards Lantern) and Userlands (Akashic Books), and online at Entropy.
I first met Coco Picard over Zoom in the summer of 2020 as we outlined her novel, The Healing Circle, via LucidChart: typing plot summaries of each vignette into a shared screen, color-coding the squares full of text, wrestling the book’s nonlinear structure onto a timeline. We were in the same small group at BookEnds, a year-long novel revision program at Stony Brook University, and yes, outlining someone’s novel as your introduction to each other is just as vulnerable and nerve-wracking and intimate as it sounds. I’ve loved Coco’s work ever since.
TIMOTHY WILLIS SANDERS is the author of the short story collections Modern Massacres (Publishing Genius, 2022) and Orange Juice and Other Stories (Publishing Genius, 2010), and the novel Matt Meets Vik (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2014). He lives in San Francisco.
David Leo Rice has been keeping busy. Since we last spoke (about A Room in Dodge City, Volume 2), he’s published a collection of short stories, edited a book of essays on David Cronenberg, and written another novel, The New House, which provided me an excuse to sit down with him again to discuss his new novel and talk more about Jewishness in American literature, heresies, and capital-A Art (among other things). The New House is available now from Whisk(e)y Tit.
LEE MATTHEW GOLDBERG is the author of ten novels including The Ancestor and The Mentor, as well as the YA series Runaway Train. He’s been a finalist in various scriptwriting contests—Script Pipeline, Book Pipeline, Stage 32, We Screenplay, the New York Screenplay, Screencraft, and the Hollywood Screenplay—and his books are in various stages of development for film and TV. He is also the co-curator of The Guerrilla Lit Reading Series in New York City.
SHY WATSON wrote Horror Vacui (House of Vlad Press, 2021) & Cheap Yellow (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2018) & co-founded blush lit. Find more work at places like New York Tyrant, The Rumpus & [PANK].
RAVI MANGLA is the author of the novels The Observant (Spuyten Duyvil) and Understudies (Outpost19). He lives in Rochester, NY.
JORDAN CASTRO is the author of The Novelist: a Novel (Soft Skull Press, 2022) and two poetry books. He is from Cleveland, Ohio.